Texans in Congress react to Obama’s Keystone pipeline rejection

“Keystone XL has played an overinflated role in its impact, obscuring the fact that it is not a silver bullet to improve the economy, and it is not the express lane to a climate disaster”, Obama said, during the speech, followed by Kallanish Energy.

“The pipeline’s rejection marks a historic victory for farmers, ranchers, tribal nations and the unlikely alliance that formed to fight this uphill, six-year battle that no one believed we’d ever win”, said Bold Nebraska, a group formed specifically to spearhead Keystone XL resistance in that state, in a news release.

Environmentalists’ concern for the planet is valid, but so is concern for how to fuel the quarter billion vehicles already on US roads and highways.

South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard said in a statement that oil will still be produced in Canada and carried by rail or pipeline elsewhere.

“The critical factor in my determination was this: moving forward with this project would significantly undermine our ability to continue leading the world in combating climate change”, he said in a statement. “I agree with that decision”.

This decision comes after President Obama vetoed a congressional bill earlier this year that aimed to bypass executive branch decision-making on the pipeline’s future and fast-track approval to construct the pipeline.

“Frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership”, the president said. “Rather than creating thousands of jobs and increasing America’s energy independence, he chose to cave to the demands of environmental extremists and enhance his own liberal legacy”.

But since 2008 the United States has experienced a domestic drilling boom which has boosted oil production 80 percent and contributed to a slump in US oil prices from above $100 a barrel to about $44.

Congressman Adrian Smith says the Keystone XL oil pipeline became a symbolic issue in the climate change movement, which led to its rejection by President Barack Obama. Keystone was nothing more than an efficient transitional step, a way to provide a stable source of oil while we get to where we need to be with clean energy. Mr. Obama on Friday forcefully argued that its economic impact would be marginal – and not worth the harm it would cause in the ongoing discussion over climate change.

DETROW: Well, if the Keystone XL pipeline is kind of overblown and also not critically important to the big picture energy landscape in the United States, there’s another policy that started taking place that’s kind of the opposite.

It’s time to tell President Obama: Enough is enough.